The cicadas of Konoha Year 10 were loud enough to give people headaches, but across the vast ocean, in Great Britain's "New London," there was only the ceaseless, distant-thunder roar of the rainforest, and a rougher, more scorching vitality.
Over two years later, the crude camp that had once consisted of a few dozen people and a handful of wooden huts had begun to resemble a town. Walls built of rammed earth and stone enclosed a reasonably orderly area, crisscrossed by dirt roads lined with all sorts of buildings: log warehouses, mud-brick workshops, thatched homes, and, at the center, the relatively tall "Governor's Residence," complete with a watchtower. Outside the walls stretched large fields cleared by felling and burning the forest, their lush green crops growing wildly beneath the fierce tropical sun. Farther away, several oversized dugout canoes and two crude vessels equipped with oars and sails lay beside the newly built docks, white flags bearing the black character "豊" flying from their masts.
The air was always filled with a mixture of sweat, earth, smoke from burning vegetation, the sounds of hammering metal and planing wood from the workshops, and an increasingly rich, peculiar fragrance of liquor drifting from the newly built, steaming "Fengdeng Liquor Distillery." It was no longer called "Toyoda Sake" here, but the more auspicious "Fengdeng Liquor." Made from a sweet, juicy wild rainforest fruit and cassava, the liquor was clear and fiery, with a distinctive flavor. Small quantities had already begun circulating through secret channels into black markets along the Land of Fire's coast, exchanged for desperately needed metal, cloth, and books.
The population had snowballed. Even without counting the loosely affiliated tribes scattered deep in the rainforest, the registered population of "New London" and its directly controlled neighboring settlements alone was approaching five thousand.